Zenith

ICT4D Week 2018

Monday, April 30, 2018

Will Trump unveil Leahy laws off Nigeria?

It may not be news that
the Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari would today, Monday, April 30, in Washington
DC, United States of America, meet President Donald Trump at the Oval Office,
but the question remained if Trump will unveil the Leahy laws off Nigeria,
writes ITRealms.

Top on the agenda of the
meeting of the two presidents comprises matters on security and economic
realignment and no society thrives where the security of the country is
under-siege as seen largely in Nigeria today.

The past week, over 30
persons have been killed including two Catholic priests and Christian faithful in
Benue State by suspected AK47 arm-welding herdsmen, while the Army claimed at
the weekend a top Boko Haram commander has been arrested over the Benue most
recent killings, thereby bringing a twist to the issues on whether those Benue
attacks were actually by herdsmen or Boko Haram.

This led the Catholic
Bishops of Nigeria to request President Buhari to resign with immediate effect,
even as some section of the National Assembly made up of the Senate and House
of Representatives have declare ‘no confidence vote’ on his administration.

Worthy of note is that on
assumption of office in 2015, President Buhari visited US and held a meeting
then with President Barrack Obama and reportedly requested what industry and
security observers tagged “counterterrorism with minimal strings” for Nigeria,
which was evidently turned down based on damning security reports.

Some of this reports
included the increasing insurgency by Boko Haram in the northeast, stressing
that the group was behind the kidnapping of over 200 schoolgirls in Chibok in
2014 as well as the abduction of more than 100 from Dapchi in February 2018, and subsequent return
of some which was largely described as drama of the absurd, moreso, following
insistence by the terrorist group not to release Leah Sharibu for refusal to
convert to Islam.

The government of the day
led by President Buhari seems helpless as they continued to claim making
strides in the fight while more and more Nigerians are being killed if not
slaughtered on daily basis.

ITRealms
gathered that the US-Nigerian security cooperation was strained under former US
President Barack Obama due to prohibition placed by the Leahy laws, which bar
providing US military assistance to specific individuals and units of foreign
militaries that have been credibly accused of committing human rights abuses.

The State Department at
the time concluded that both Boko Haram and the Nigerian military had committed
atrocities. Some Nigerian troops, specifically, were accused in a State
Department report of committing extra-judicial killings, torture, rape,
arbitrary detention, and widespread violence.

Acknowledging these human rights concerns, the
director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center, J. Peter Pham, who is also
vice president for research and regional initiatives at the Atlantic Council,
said: “I would make the argument not to allow the best to be the enemy of the
good.” Stressing that “Absent of clear evidence of a systematically abusive
regime, moral preening is of little utility in dealing with situations like
this.”

Trump in contrast, had pushed ahead military
cooperation with Nigeria with his administration in 2017 given approval for the sale to Nigeria of 12 military planes and security
equipment worth $600 million; which is still a huge mess when it comes to due
process as the National Assembly said there is no evidence such money was
appropriated either in 2017 or 2018 budget.

Also, Trump had sought to improve relations with
African countries which he allegedly referred to in derogatory terms in January
this year, according to Pham. Incidentally, in March, Trump’s top diplomat, Rex
Tillerson, then Secretary of State came to Nigeria only to spent a few hours as
he was forced to cut short a trip to Africa. Trump fired Tillerson on his
return from this trip.

With the above observations, industry and
diplomatic watchers are still in awe why Buhari should trust Trump to change
his mind so soon from the core ‘American first’ stanza, moreso, that the
reasons adduced by the Obama administration under Leahy laws rather than change,
but is getting worse.

For the Christian
Association of Nigeria (CAN) over 300 Nigerians have been killed since January
1 and last weekend and specifically in Benue but no arrest has been made, and
action to conclusively show determination by the government, rather the Buhari
administration appeared helpless as it resorted to sending condolences.

All eyes is now on Mr.
Trump to know if he will still proceed with 2017 approval to Nigeria, amidst
alleged ethnic cleansing against President Buhari’s administration, although
the reverse is possible if adequate homework is done to strengthen the ties
between the two countries before the Oval Office meeting.

The prayer of every
well-meaning Nigerian is for the government of Buhari to overcome insurgency
and stand up against the herdsmen, which the government claimed came from aftermath
of Libya civil conflict, yet the last weekend arrest of Boko Haram commander
over the Benue killings in the last fortnight sends a wrong signal, according
another school of thought; in that those Benue attacks may have been as well perpetrated
by Boko Haram all this while, whereas the government and military search for
excuses by tagging them herdsmen from neighbouring countries.

The fact that by the end
of this Oval Office meeting between Buhari and Trump, a new security statistics
could emerge to either justify the outcome or damn it.

The Leahy Laws or Leahy
amendments are U.S. human rights laws that prohibit the U.S. Department of
State and Department of Defense from providing military assistance to foreign
security force units that violate human rights with impunity.[1] It is named
after its principal sponsor, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont).

To implement this law,
U.S. embassies, the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, and the
appropriate regional bureau of the U.S. Department of State vet potential recipients
of security assistance. If a unit is found to have been credibly implicated in
a serious abuse of human rights, assistance is denied until the host nation
government takes effective steps to bring the responsible persons within the
unit to justice.

While the U.S. Government does not publicly report on foreign
armed forces units it has cut off from receiving assistance, press reports have
indicated that security force and national defense force units in Bangladesh,
Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, Nigeria, Turkey, Indonesia, Lebanon, and
Saint Lucia have been denied assistance due to the Leahy Law.

Senator Leahy first
introduced this law in 1997 as part of the Foreign Operations Appropriations
Act. It initially referred only to counter-narcotics assistance for one year.

The next year, with his leadership, Congress expanded it to cover all State
Department funded assistance. This provision was included in all annual Foreign
Operations budget laws until 2008. At that time Congress made the law permanent
by amending it into the Foreign Assistance Act. In 2011, Congress revised the
law substantially, seeking to enhance its implementation.

The United States
government has long been a major, if not the largest, provider of
assistance—funding, training, non-lethal equipment, and/or weaponry---to
foreign military and other security forces.

In 2012 it spent $25 billion on training and
equipping foreign militaries and law enforcement agencies of more than 100
countries around the world.[6] Security assistance is driven by overriding U.S.
national security objectives, including a desire to challenge/overturn
communist regimes during the Cold War, counter drug trafficking in the 1990s,
or counter anti-Western terrorism in the 2000s. Throughout the United States'
long history of providing assistance to foreign armed forces, some portion of
this assistance has been provided to forces that repress and abuse their own
populations.

Before 1997, the primary
U.S. legislation constraining aid to countries with poor human rights records
was Section 502B of the Foreign Assistance Act, which prohibited security
assistance to “any country the government of which engages in a consistent
pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” This
law was seen as too vague to be effective in cases where the U.S. government
had an overriding interest.

According to Senator Leahy, his law “makes it clear
that when credible evidence of human rights violations exists, U.S. aid must
stop. But, it provides the necessary flexibility to allow the U.S. to advance
its foreign policy objectives in these countries.”

As Nigerians hope for the best, may the best come out of the Oval Office meeting today.